Pride & Prejudice + Rebecca = folklore

I’ve been thinking about gothic lit, how romance is a form of fantasy, and the offerings of genre. I read Pride and Prejudice a few years ago, as one does, and like, it was fun, and I got the appeal (enemies to lovers!). It is revolutionary of the genre, but I couldn't necessarily separate it from its current commercialization. It just felt a little too shiny. I always thought Elizabeth was correct in dismissing Mr. Darcy as arrogant, because Darcy is a dud, and I would have turned away in disgust and never returned, so it taught me nothing. In May, I read Rebecca, and I loved the themes of isolation and the insanity of the natural imagery. Aside from the fact that Manderley and Pemberley sound sonically similar in syllables with that sing-song quality that the “ley” sound provides, they seem like foils, or like Manderley is the gothic version of Pemberley. A SPOOKY REVERSAL? I will be spoiling and stripping these stories for parts (it's called literary analysis, baby), so heed this warning. But I felt like I needed a third entry point or way to connect these two novels further. Enter Taylor Swift releasing folklore, and the angels of inspiration found favor in my sight. Music is restorative, and art is connected; I listened to a lot of folklore while writing this essay, so much so that she’s a supporting character.

Taylor Swift’s folklore braids the fantasy-like romance of Austen, the stuff of period dramas she’s been watching in quarantine that flirt via ribbons, dense declarations, and hand touches with the gothic aesthetic that flirt via apparitions, revenge, and property ownership that Du Maurier’s Rebecca re-explores into her motif-filled eighth studio album to find a third space of contemporary scorn, success, and the sublime. Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield muses upon Swift’s folklore writing process in his album review:

She just made some coffee, sat at the piano, and let her mind wander into some dark places. You can picture the candle on her piano flickering as the wax melts over her copy of Wuthering Heights and another song rolls out...It makes perfect sense that the quarantine brought out her best, since she’s always written so poignantly about isolation and the temptation to dream too hard about other people’s far-away lives. On “folklore,” she dreams up a host of characters to keep her company, and stepping into their lives brings out her deepest wit, compassion, and empathy.

While paralleling folklore’s themes and motifs, I must centralize this analysis on the fixture of the house: the estates of Pemberley of Austen fame, and Manderley of Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and ‘Holiday House,’ former Rhode Island property of Rebekah and Bill Hearst, now owned by Miss Swift. Houses as the source of fear and freedom.

It is important to dive into the novelists' real-life relationships and inspiration for the estates. Du Maurier discovered Menabilly, an estate in Cornwall on a family vacation in 1926; she said it possessed her “ as a mistress holds a lover.” She was fascinated, indulged, and completely envious:

The inspiration for Manderley was an obsession born of frustration. Du Maurier had coveted Menabilly House in Cornwall for decades before she was able to live there. And it was in the years of pining for it that she created the enigmatic mansion at the centre of Rebecca... Her first attempt to visit the house was during an illicit ramble with her sister, Angela. The drive, as they had been warned, was “nearly three miles long, and overgrown. ” As in the opening of the novel, the walk up that twisting path felt endless: the pair were forced to turn back by the onset of nightfall.

It took another year before Du Maurier made it through the woods and found the house abandoned, in a state of broken glory: “The windows were shuttered fast … Ivy covered the grey walls and threw tendrils round the windows.” Inside, “family portraits stared into the silence and the dust” and the library “had become a lumber place.” It wasn’t until 1943, five years after the publication of the novel that immortalised the house and its power to inspire obsession, that Du Maurier was finally granted a lease on the property and set to work repairing the “blitzed building,” as she called it, and making it into a family home.

Harboring feelings of jealousy, eagerness, and possessiveness are obvious motivations for the characters in Rebecca as well. Du Maurier’s came upon this house and her imagination went wild into dreaming up dark and mysterious events that the house facilitated. In this same way, Swift’s Rhode Island home experiences feel informed, linked in Swift’s mind to the previous owner of the house, Rebekah (even the name parallels!) Harkness, an infamous American socialite that renovated the Rhode Island mansion for her own personal use (adding 8 kitchens and 21 bathrooms, presumably to distance herself from her children) after the death of her husband, William Hearst. I think Swift and Harkness looked at the house as an escape, a way to play hostess, but the events grew dramatic and inspired gossip. It’s an interesting detail that Du Maurier pined after Menabilly House and wrote a whole novel in order to indulge her romanticization of that house; the novel is not based on experience but projection. Austen’s inspiration for Pemberley is her cousin’s house in Kent. Austen felt that nothing bad could happen at Godmersham Park in Kent, (“Everyone is rich here”) which fascinated Austen who experienced a life of more modest means. Upon visiting, Austen would spend hours writing letters in the library as if she were playing dress up in a more luxurious life that she ultimately gave to Elizabeth in marrying Mr. Darcy. This writing letter ideal is paralleled in Rebecca in that the narrator is haunted by Rebecca’s routine of writing letters in the morning room and feels suffocated by the expanse of the house and upkeep of its happenings. Present in each work, is the folklore (if you will) of the actual houses as driving forces of the stories and can seep into the story with an underbelly of jealousy and envy or wring out happiness.

Let’s talk protagonists. Du Maurier wrote Imagines way before Tumblr did. The narrator of Rebecca is unnamed; she is not the titular Rebecca. With no first name, she is merely the second Mrs. De Winter. It’s a Y/N sitch. It is an exploration of perspective and an inventive way to use first person to build anxiety, emphasizing the narrator’s desperation to claim identity. She meets this mysterious older man in Monte Carlo where she is working as a companion for an annoying old rich lady. In attaching herself to Maxim, being a wife of someone notable when she has no family or money to her own unspecified name and to be desired by someone is her way to make her own life story one of adventures, not stations of necessity. This is so key in the narrator’s willingness to accept anything to make this life work for her, even if there are so many secrets she struggles to unravel, and when she does, she does little to oppose the treachery. The narrator marries Maxim less than one hundred pages in, and the romance eventually brings a mundane happiness, but incites horror. Really, Rebecca is one part romance and three parts crime novel. As an audience, you are wishing that the narrator has more self-confidence, but that’s how the story goes full on psychological thriller. Elizabeth, though, is self-possessed. She’s snarky and loving. She finds personal identity in her sisters and reading and humor and self-reflection. Yet marrying Mr. Darcy is also a solution to escaping her family’s poverty. Mrs. Bennet is greatly vexed with her wish to see her daughters married well, because the family has little fortune to provide. Elizabeth isn’t preoccupied with marriage, but of course, falls in love anyway. Rebakah Harkness’ marriage to Hearst was fine (we guess), but the lifestyle I think was the main draw. Harkness is defined by her love of theatrics (by literally founding a ballet and just generally having drama), her affinity for retribution, and cleverness. I think these themes can safely be applied to themes in Swift’s discography. This is definitely not an essay about Swift’s loves, and she is too good of an artist to only focus on that, but in contrast to the fictional women at play, she is not out here looking to improve her status—her status is multi-millionaire, so she can own her own agency. In all of these women’s lives, the men are mostly plot points in their stories, but important players, nonetheless.

In reading Du Maurier’s Rebecca, the centrality of the estate (like any good gothic novel) is present on page one with eerie descriptions of creeping, curling vines on the gates of this vast, hollowed estate (“The trees had thrown out low branches, making an impediment to progress, the gnarled roots looked like skeleton claws”)— something ghostly lingered: “There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it had always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in a hollow of a hand” (page 1-2). The floral imagery is abundant too. Immediately upon arriving at the house, the narrator is struck by the presence of the rhododendrons, “They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron I had ever seen before” (page 66). The rhododendrons are ever present in the narrator's new life, they line the path to the house, they’re cut and vased on the entry table,and they are in view from the morning room window as well. They’re a bleeding reminder of Rebecca’s stain-like presence throughout Manderley, shocking to the eye in their vivid color but mundane in their existence. Every rhododendron is a symbol of Rebecca’s presence and remains powerful even after death. They are a frightening sight to the narrator, and they’re wildly overgrown, “And these [rhododendrons] were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful, they were not plants at all” (page 66). The white azaleas are Rebecca’s scent, still lingering throughout the house. The Happy Valley on the De Winter property is full of thickets of rich, white azaleas and rhododendrons. On a walk with Maxim, he hands a the narrator a fallen petal, “It was crushed and bruised, and turning brown at the curled edge, but as I rubbed it across my hand the scent rose to me, sweet and strong, vivid as the living tree from which it came” (page 110). Literally Maxim handing the narrator Rebecca’s death and legacy, as if to say “Here it’s yours now. You deal.” Cool cool cool. Basically Manderley is a hall of mirrors reflecting the ashes of Rebecca— the staff, the rooms, the routine, the flowers—all of it Rebecca’s. Manderley is a huge hindrance in Maxim and the narrator’s relationship. That’s why they will only survive if they escape.

The former mistress, Rebekah, haunts Swift too. Swift renews the cycle of celebrity and woe that transpired at the Holiday House, “Fifty years is a long time/ Holiday House sat quietly on that beach/ Free of women with madness/ Their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me.” But here’s the thing: Swift's is an empowering tale because she bought the house by writing ballads and bops alike, and built her own fantasy. Maybe parts of it came crashing down, and she connects with the ignominy and reckless whims of a former owner, but she is ultimately the owner of her house and story.

Pemberley, though, is the instrument that ultimately unifies Elizabeth and Darcy. Upon first meeting Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth hates him, of course, and describes him as follows,

“He was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared to his friend (Bingley)” (page 19).

Which actually is very untrue, because his large estate in Derbyshire is in fact the very thing that saves him in the mind of Elizabeth. Now I am not saying that Elizabeth merely wants the $$$, but I think seeing his home endeared her to him. In touring the estate with her aunt and uncle during open house hours, Elizabeth is charmed by Pemberley, realizing that maybe she has blushy feelings for Darcy after all.

[Elizabeth drools over a family portrait] “There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance… Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favorable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentient of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.” (page 213)

She is super into the fabrics on the couch, then realizing that he has good taste, and further that she even cares about his couch cushions! His house does a better job flirting than the man himself. In the 2005 Joe Wright P&P, Keira Knightley as Elizabeth caresses the statues in his house-museum and you just know she’s contemplating her feelings; she’s having a moment. The house tour was really just a realization tour of Elizabeth's genuine feelings for Darcy. Pride and Prejudice as a title suggests a moral application, emphasizing that the fatal flaws are arrogance for Mr. Darcy and intolerance for Elizabeth . The genius of Pride and Prejudice, though, is that it is characterized by the small judgements we build to construct versions of others in our head, ways to view them as unfit, a story of paying attention to all the wrong things. The magic of a relationship is that when feelings erupt the constructions that she “smiles too much” and he “dances too little” crack like shattered images of the other and are replaced by flawed, yet idealized versions. Pemberley becomes our heroine’s home when Mr Darcy and Elizabeth get married. It is earned by Austen’s storytelling. You live in fantasy, fantasy turns domesticity.

After the first time we all listened to the album, Shea said, “Taylor Swift just wrote a movie,” which feels so true in so many ways. folklore feels cinematic with central images and a specific tone, and the references to film itself, from “exile”s’ repeated, “I think I’ve seen this film before /and I didn’t like the ending” or “leaving out the side door” to the “you’re a flashback in a film reel on the/ one screen in my town,” in “this is me trying.” At the same time, what she’s doing is literary, returning to mini motifs to show the evolution of story in “cardigan,” the teetering “high heels on cobblestones” evolves to “I was walking home on broken cobblestones,” to represent that the structure of the relationship had crumbled. Or how the theme of home or loss of home is woven through the album with “You’re not my homeland anymore,” (exile) “then it was bought by me” actual purchase of the Holiday House (the last great american dynasty), “I can go anywhere just not home” (my tears ricochet) to “I think your house is haunted” (seven) to represent the wavering feelings of security. Ghosts metaphoric or otherwise are all over her discography from “ghosts from your past gonna jump out at me/ lurking in the shadows with their lip gloss smiles,” (Ours) to “you know I didn’t want to/have to haunt you/But what a ghostly scene” (my tears ricochet). These hauntings and houses are stability and regret, loss, and grief. Like in P&P and Rebecca, home is this dichotomy of individual freedom and a trapping for one’s fears. These stories know the goals of romance are a shared space and love, but have experienced the leftover feelings and the open wounds of the past. Swift pulls imagery from the gothic, supernatural and natural themes from the Romantics (even outright to Wordsworth in "the lakes”) with romance in the love story, happy ending tradition of Austen to build the foundation of her album while adding personal details in order to create a tapestry of characters in her new album, folklore.